Big Business Loves the Computer Gaming Industry

David Greenspan writes "Video games are no longer exclusive to a consumer market. Business Week has an article on the new trend of big business willing to pay millions for custom-made games. The casual market has inspired folks in business to realize the broad appeal of games, and some of the possibilities inherent to the medium. As a result, business games are now big business. From the article: 'To reach the billion-dollar mark, the market will have to overcome the common wisdom that games are inherently not serious. A serious games market will also require game developers to shift from the traditional business-to-consumer model to a business-to-business one. Today when major studios and publishers are approached by companies interested in commissioning, say, an employee-training game based on a successful commercial title, more often than not those studios and publishers decline. Even if the interested company is offering $5 million, it's not worth the gamemakers' time to divert engineers from a commercial title likely to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in sales.'"

Have it Your Way

[vatica40]

One only has to look at the success of the Burger King XBox games to know this has the potential to be absolutely huge.

Cripes, it can't be that hard...

[Penguinisto]

Back in the day, tons of programmers and modelers who happen to be gamers banded together to create MODs of popular games.

All it would really take is for a corp to do a couple of things, and have it done (relatively) on the cheap:

1. License an existing game engine for a fixed sum
2. hit a place like Gamasutra (or any popular MOD board) and hire some freelancers

It's not exactly as if you have to howl in the wilderness. It just takes some brains is all.

For 5 million bucks, I'm sure a corp could secure and contract the requisite resources w/o having to resort to desperate measures.

/P

Serious business?

[Joe Random]

To reach the billion-dollar mark, the market will have to overcome the common wisdom that games are inherently not serious.

The whole problem seems to be the name itself. Games. Of course, the "fun" connotation can be removed. Consider a game of poker (stakes can be very high, fortunes can be made or lost), as a "serious" game. Even better, consider war games, or a nice game of chess. Games don't have to be serious, but calling them "games" makes it an uphill battle. Maybe if companies added a little spin, and called them "computer-aided training simulators" or something, business would take them more seriously, and would invest more time and money in utilizing them.

Phlegm?

[Kadin2048]

with phlegm instead of death and gore

A questionable improvement, to be sure.

Answered your own question there, didn't ya?

[Trojan35]

"Today when major studios and publishers are approached by companies interested in commissioning, say, an employee-training game based on a successful commercial title, more often than not those studios and publishers decline. Even if the interested company is offering $5 million"

So if I went to Spielberg and asked him to spend a couple years on a "Employee Training for Microsoft" movie for $5m, do you think he'd go for it?

Ah the hubris of business

[andphi]

FTFS, which is FTFA: 'To reach the billion-dollar mark, the market will have to overcome the common wisdom that games are inherently not serious. A serious games market will also require game developers to shift from the traditional business-to-consumer model to a business-to-business one."

The first sentence I agree with. "The Market" will need to get over itself and the idea that products which are put to trivial uses must be trivial. The second sentence, however, does not follow logically from the first or from observable reality. We have a serious games market. It's a hybrid of B2B and B2C, with a lot of the end products (and the raison d'etre of the B2B types) coming from their B2C counterparts. Look at all the engine makers. If the original game engines (meant to be bought and played by end-users) had not succeeded, if the demand by gamers for games based on said engines did not exist, there would be no market for things like the Unreal and Quake engines. B2B game marketing is merely a new segment, not the whole of the market.

Well I agree that developers should focus on games

[Billly Gates]

If the market is 5 million vs a potential 15 million its easier to follow the money and its a no brainer.

Most training business apps can be written in flash by a jr programmer or javaFX. Game engine licensing is a different issue. You can license it for a few hundred thousand and just hire some temp game programmers if you have a 5 million dollar budget but dont expect the game makers to develop anything but a license for you.

The Real SimCity

[Foktip]

Video game companies are very good at making effective and user-friendly software, and that kind of quality is lacking in products made for buisnesses - most of which have to settle for generic CAD programs that can do "everything" instead of merely doing the specific application required easily and effectively.

Take SimCity for example - if you could adapt it to instead be used for city-planning in works departments (water, gas, civil/construction, hydro, etc.), it would make things more simple/easy, and it could simulate the future.

Re:Answered your own question there, didn't ya?

[Joe Random]

That's not a fair comparison, though. Most companies want a game based on previous work. For instance, take the Quake engine, tack on some different levels, sprites, and scripts, and sell it to the company. Development costs, while certainly not zero, are going to be fairly low compared to developing the game in the first place.

This would be more like going to Spielberg and asking him to spend a couple of months remixing a previously-filmed movie and adding a couple of extra scenes for $5m.

Re:Just look at Forza 2

[twistedsymphony]

There was also a similar promotion with Cadillac and PGR3.

Fine by me... it just means I get more free cars to play with, if anything this is good. Rather than Developer X paying heaps of money for licensing they auto makers pay the game developer to include their cars... As long as they steer clear of the "make sure our car outperforms our competitors car in the game" then it can greatly reduce development costs.